Has anyone else been watching and has now finished Altered Carbon on Netflix? If not, you really should make a start.

No spoilers from me, but a brief summary. At the start I was watching it with the subtitles switched on as it was all new to me having not read the books, they mumbled a fair bit to begin with, and there were lots of new terms to try and understand. As you might expect given some the barriers mentioned, I was mildly interested but wanted to give it a few episodes as I knew the book was very highly regarded as is the author, Richard Morgan.

By the time I was a few episodes in I had changed from thinking it was ok to the place where I was looking at the time and thinking just one more episode, just one more and then bed.

I’ve now burned through the whole series, all 10 episodes, in less than a week.

Some highlights. The look of the show is amazing. Shiny and futuristic but also grimy and seedy down below where all the poor people live while the rich live in the clouds and nothing is beyond them.

Aesthetics aside, it was a fascinating show about family, what constitutes a family and how to build a new one, religion and faith. Given the premise there is obviously a huge focus on what it means to be human. There’s also a lot about gender, death, redemption and revenge. Power and money are strong themes as well. The future echoes the present in many ways where the rich can do and say whatever they want and the poor suffer the most. It was definitely a story about imbalance in society, rebellion, justice and also love.

The cast was incredibly diverse too with both strong, layered and interesting roles for men and women. It’s not a spoiler to mention the basic premise of sleeving, moving your consciousness into other bodies, so as you can imagine this led to some fascinating scenes and really interesting challenges for the actors. Men in women’s bodies and vice versa. People of different faiths and ethnicity finding themselves in sleeves that are so different to their own skin. One actor, whose name I will have to dig out from IMDB, must have come in for one bit part but by the end of two episodes his role had been transformed into a rollercoaster of a ride. It was a gift of an acting job. I can’t say more without spoilers but I would loved to have seen the casting sheet for that particular role as it required some unique skills!

If you have the time it is well worth the effort of persisting past the first couple of episodes where I wasn’t sure what was going on really.